Operations support systems exist to provide efficient monitoring and support of line, heavy, shop maintenance, engineering, materials management, finance and other aspects of aviation and other fields. Existing web-based operations support systems can be spread over large geographies, but only insofar as each part of that organization can remain fully-connected to the central server or data centre. Attempts have been made to provide such a system in a deployed manner, by having multiple, complete, instances of the software deployed and carefully managing (manually) which instance has custody over which assets and the periodic resynchronization between them.
Such systems have several issues which make them ineffective or at least very inefficient, the main one being synchronization. When a site is deployed, they are granted control over the assets being deployed, meaning that conflicts with other sites are reduced (someone cannot ‘accidentally’ edit data for an asset that belongs to another site). But having multiple individual installations of the software means synchronization is manual and conflict resolution is very complex.
Another aspect to the synchronization problem is environment setup. In some systems it is important, for example, to track ‘allowable configuration’ (in simple terms, what is allowed to be installed on an aircraft or component) and the ‘maintenance program’ (that is, what needs to be done to keep the asset airworthy). With two separate complete installations, keeping these synchronized is very difficult, and the implications of not doing so are that it may be difficult or impossible to align the two systems.
Existing systems do not provide adequate solutions to these problems. There is therefore a need for an improved method of and system for providing deployed operations support.